Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution

• Transcript of Unscripted, Episode 2: Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution

  Jennifer Woodley (JW): The opinions and perspectives shared in this episode are entirely those of the speakers. They do not reflect, in whole or in part, the official views, policies, or positions of Library and Archives Canada or the Government of Canada.

  Discover Library and Archives Canada presents “Unscripted”—a series that shares our live events with audiences everywhere. Each episode features insightful discussions with authors and other subject matter experts, showcasing how Library and Archives Canada collections often inform their compelling bodies of work.

  In September 1945, Canadian democracy faced a fundamental question of constitutional law: could citizens be expelled on the basis of race? Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had already experienced uprooting, internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment. Challenging Exile investigates the origins, administration, litigation and aftermath of this attempt at gross injustice and shares the stories of resilience of those who faced it.

  How did Japanese Canadians navigate the challenges arrayed against them? Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the proposed exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that forced them from their homes, stripped their livelihoods and possessions, and deprived them of fundamental rights. They also analyze the constitutional framework of the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race and rights at a time of change in Canadian law and politics.

  Unfolding in a context of global conflict, sharpened borders and racist suspicion, the story told in Challenging Exile has enduring relevance for our own troubled times. This meticulous and moving account of a shameful episode in Canada’s past tells a necessary story not only for scholars and historians of law, politics and human rights, but also for readers of Canadian history.

  Gary Goodacre: I'm Gary Goodacre, Director of Programs here at Library and Archives Canada. I would like to respectfully acknowledge that we are gathered amongst the ancestral lands and waters of the Anishinaabe Algonquin people. Since time immemorial, they have inhabited and cared for these lands on which we live, work, and play. We recognize and honour their enduring relationship with this territory, which remains unceded and unsurrendered.

  Tonight, we are proud to be hosting the launch of Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution by Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross. Eric and Jordan worked closely with LAC staff and records when conducting their research. Library and Archives Canada is a national repository for stories, some of which are written in books and others waiting to be revealed through careful research of archival documents. We are committed to protecting these stories so that future generations of Canadians can see, hear, and learn these stories for themselves. I would like to extend my welcome and thanks on behalf of Library and Archives Canada to you, the audience for being here this evening, to the Ottawa Japanese Community Association for their involvement in today's events, and to Eric and Jordan who are sharing these important stories with us. I would also like to welcome the Deputy Head of Mission, Minister Hideaki Ishii. Thank you for joining us. Without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce this evening's moderator, Audrey Kobayashi is a distinguished Professor Emerita at Queen's University. She has spent five decades conducting participatory and activist research among Japanese Canadians, and among those who now live in the Powell Street District from which Japanese Canadians were uprooted. During the 1980s, she was a member of the team that negotiated the Japanese Canadian redress settlement. Merci. Enjoy your evening.

  Audrey Kobayashi (AK): Thank you very much. It's such a pleasure to be here. And I have traveled across the lands of the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee to come here today, and it's just a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for coming. I want to start by just a quick thank you to Eric and Jordan for writing this fabulous book. It's really a wonderful book. I don't know how many of you -- how many of you have read it already? Nobody.

  AK: Oh, yes, of course. You haven't had a chance.

  Eric M. Adams (EMA): Get Reading!

  AK: You will get a chance and you will find out that the very first line of the book is “this book began in disagreement”, and that's why I'm sitting in the middle in case a fight breaks out. And I won't have very much to say today except to talk a little bit about the tone of the book, which they won't do. As I'm reading through the book and you may find the same thing, I can say, “Oh, Eric wrote this; Oh, Jordan wrote this”, and I'm pretty sure that I'm right.

  And it's not just because one is a historian and one is a legal scholar, which of course is important. It's also because the book has a kind of spirit, and not only of the two authors, but also of the people that they're writing about. It's not sort of a dry, legal and historical account. It brings to life these 4,000-some people who were exiled, who lost their citizenship, who were subject to racialization and racism and injustice. And it's about citizenship. I won't say any more because they're going to talk about the book, but I was very, very honoured to have written the preface. And I'll just read the three lines that I started the preface with as a Haiku, “Exile is always a story of belonging until it is not." Now, who's going to go first? You first? Okay. Eric said something about the bride side and the groom side. All right. Eric's going to go first. And maybe you'll start by just telling us why did you write this book, and a little bit about what the book means to you, but also what it means to citizenship and our country, which as the events south of the border show us has a number of aspects of citizenship that we should really cherish.

  EMA: Well, thank you for that. And just even hearing from Audrey for a few moments, you already know why we asked her to write our preface. She is a leader in this community. She's one of Canada's great scholars of this history, and we've worked with her really closely these last number of years. And so one of the things I like best about this book is when I open it up, the first person I get to read is a little bit from Audrey. So thank you, Audrey, for those pages, but also for being here tonight. And maybe before I start to think about that question from Audrey, just to the people in this room, we have friends here and family here, and we also have some of our mentors here. And we also have new folks that we don't know here. Whatever brought you to Library and Archives Canada tonight, we just want to thank you for being in the room. And we hope you come and introduce yourself, and we'd love to sign a book if you've got one or just to say hello. We really want to thank you for being here. Writing can be quite a solitary pursuit, which is why I like to do it with Jordan because he won't stop talking while I'm writing. But when you launch a book, you start to see the world that it's going to enter into. And it makes me very happy to think that this room is a sign of the world that it's entering into. So the first question was a small one, which is, why did you write such a book? Why did you write this book, and what does it have to tell us? Maybe I'll just say, especially I think appropriately given this week of remembrance and Remembrance Day, that I had a grandfather who served in the Second World War for six years. And this is a week I think about him, and I think about all of the ways in which that war shaped Canada. And Remembrance Day has us remembering in some ways the end, the beginning of peace, which I think is a hopeful moment to grab hold of after you face the kind of inhumanity that we are capable of in these times of conflict.

  And one of the things I think is true about this history is that it doesn't end at that moment when peace begins. As a country, I think we know something of the beginning of the war, and I think we know something about the internment of Japanese Canadians. I think that has entered into public history, a sense that this internment did occur. But one of the things that struck Jordan and I, especially as we learned more and more about this particular history, was that the ending of this episode, what we call the cascade of injustice, was not well accounted for; was not well understood, was not well documented in much of this history, and certainly hadn't entered into the sense of how the Second World War ended in Canada. Because for the Japanese Canadian community, it doesn't end at all. It keeps grinding away with its injustice, worse and worse forms of it. And it culminates in some ways, although the reverberations never really end. But some of, I think how it culminates is in a shocking moment of exile when over 10,000 Canadians of Japanese descent are faced with the government of Canada trying to expel them, banish them from this place, from their homes, from Canada, from the place of their citizenship. And that exercise, that exile, which has nothing to do with internment in a sense, it's about expelling people out forever, stripping them of citizenship and breaking their bonds with this country. That exercise occurs when war is over.

  And so for Jordan and I, we thought, how do we tell a story of the end, which isn't the end? And it was that sense of exile that really motivated us at the start. The second thing I'll say as a legal historian is that for any lawyers in the crowd or people that have been to law school, cases are the favorite thing that we have to tell the stories of the law. And there is a case about exile and it goes to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1946, in the first case ever heard in the building that's just steps away. At that point, new Supreme Court of Canada building hears as its very first case, a case with an ugly name: Reference Re: Persons of the Japanese Race. And that case where as a legal historian I wanted to go to understand something of exile, I found an awful lot of words, and an awful lot of law, but not an awful lot of story. The case does not contain the people on whom this exile was being forced. And it does not contain a story of all of the ways that the history took them to this precipice, to this moment of injustice. All of that had been sapped away from the lines of these cases. And so, in wanting to tell the story of exile, and in particular wanting to tell a legal story of exile, how is this a story also about law, about the tremendous wrongs that law was capable of, but also about the ways in which law has resources and ideas and ideals that are meant to fight injustice, including in something like the exile, a concept of rights, a concept of equality, a concept of fairness. Where were those ideals and those moments of inspiration and aspiration at a time when Canada needed them most?

  And they were absent from the case: Reference Re: Persons of the Japanese Race, and they were absent from the moment of exile, but they were very much alive in the Japanese Canadian community, the story that wasn't told in the exile case. And so a legal historian like me who wanted to tell the story behind the story turned to -- and here's the good coincidence. The person that I wanted to write this book with, who knows more than almost anyone about some of this history, is also my best friend. I was able to say to Jordan, let's think about a way to tell a story of exile that hasn't been well captured in this history. And that was when the project began. Maybe I'll let Jordan say a little more.

  Jordan Stanger-Ross (JS-R): Thanks, Eric. Thanks, Audrey. I think this is the first time the three of us have presented together. It's wonderful to be up on stage with the two of you. Thanks, Eric, for a wonderful introduction there. For me, the story of why I wrote the book started in the room over there. I'm not sure how many know the next room. Oh, it's another floor up, you're right. The gentleman that's right -- they seem really similar, the floors. Would you go floor to floor? But that's right. It's there. And I had come for what I thought was a very limited search into some records related to the forced sale of property. And I ordered a bunch of boxes in the reading room upstairs, and what came were these incredible records of the meetings in which Canadian officials mostly obscure at the time, bureaucrats, made decisions that governed the lives of Japanese Canadians. And not one decision to uproot Japanese Canadians from Coastal, BC, but dozens of decisions, even hundreds of decisions, decisions with regards to policies that flowed from that first uprooting, and then decisions in response to individual families requesting funds for a winter coat in the BC interior where they were cold, hundreds, even thousands of decisions. And I came to see a room within which people were sitting and their conversations were recorded in which alternatives were considered, and in which officials made the repeated decisions to do harm to Japanese Canadians and offered rationale for those choices.

  Hannah Arendt has a quote that I return to often, writing of state violence in the 1940s where she writes that Under conditions of terror, most people will submit, or I guess even collaborate. People will participate but some will not. And no more can be asked, and no more is needed for the earth to remain a place inhabitable for humans. [TT1.1]So I started to read those records, both interested in the people who submitted, who collaborated in that process and looking for those people who might not for those alternative voices in the room. And that room in which the decisions were made in addition to the courtrooms that Eric's started to describe, that was a room I was very motivated to understand and ultimately to write about. And then I met Audrey shortly thereafter, and I met Joy Kagawa, and I met folks from the Nikkei National Museum, some of whom are here today. And I started to see this other room as well, or many rooms within internment shacks and in barns in which Japanese Canadians were confined, and in homes all across the country to which they were scattered, in which they dealt with the ramifications of the decisions being made by bureaucrats and had their own complicated and varied discussions and responses of their own. And encouraged by folks like Audrey, I became as invested also in understanding that room. And then there was a room I could hardly understand at all, which is the courtroom. The case law, I couldn't read it. I couldn't understand it, the case I found incredibly confusing. Luckily for me, my closest friend can read case law, so I was able to collaborate with him in writing this book. The last thing that Audrey asked was about what the case means to us today. And when I talk about that, I always just quote Eric. So maybe actually I'll turn back to you, Eric, to talk about what you think the case means today.

  EMA: I think there's a line in our book that says something like "history does not end with the stories we tell of it". And because when you co-write a book, you can never remember who wrote what sentence, we both think we wrote that sentence. It's like when you get home from holidays and you both claim to have taken the good photos, we both get to think that we wrote the good sentences of our book. But one of the ways that we wanted to understand this moment of injustice and exile in which more than 3,000 Canadians are in fact exiled, over 10,000 were threatened. But the government does carry through and coerce about 3,000 Canadians into leaving Canada in 1946 in five sailings of exile. And in some ways, those end moments of exile when 3,000 people end their connection to Canada was for Jordan and I, also new stories that we wanted to follow. And so this book is also one that follows those families and people to exile and to what they encountered in Japan when they got there. And we really want to pay tribute to the Japanese Canadians that both had their stories memorialized through oral history and a number of the families that we were able to work with and to help keep these stories in published works and part of this history. And so we wanted to show some of the ways in which exile just opens new chapters of family life and family history.

  But the other thing that happens in Canada is that Canada begins to shift in response in part to exile. And in particular there is a moment, and it's this moment in Canada when what is thinkable in one moment, let's exile people on the basis of race, 1945, 1946. Suddenly in 1946 becomes at first slowly, but then more rapidly a feeling in the broader Canadian public that this is a wrong of some kind. And there are various kinds of rationales for the way in which this is wrong. But one of the things that begins to be covered in the press, a press that had largely and really shockingly cheered on so much of the internment and dispossession and early exile of Japanese Canadians. Now we see the Canadian press begin to argue, well, what will rights mean in this post-war world if anyone can be stripped of their citizenship? What will Canadian citizenship mean if being born in this country provides you with no rights and the ability of the government to forcibly remove you from this country? What will rights mean if all of us are subject to the possibility of racialized harms? And those arguments beginning in 1946 and 1947, begin to coalesce around a feeling that exile is one of the lessons of the war. And that is being driven by Japanese Canadians who want to keep that message alive in the Canadian public. They want to keep it alive in Canadian politics. It's not immediately successful, but it is persistent.

  And it occurs through the 1950s, through the 1960s and into the 1970s and '80s, when Japanese Canadians are still making these arguments, many of whom had familial experience of internment, dispossession and exile, who were arguing in 1981 that Canada needed constitutional change, that this was a history and danger of being repeated. We end the book on the idea that no piece of paper, no constitution, no Declaration of Rights, is capable of protecting us all from our own worst impulses as a society if we are not prepared to see one another in full rights and full dignity. But it's also the case that through rights and through a legal system that is better able to recognize human dignity, we give ourselves our best opportunity to recognize that dignity. And in a moment when we know that the world, but also this continent feels under stress and strain, as rights and concepts of citizenship begin to erode in real-time as exile returns as a real possibility in places where we thought it was not possible, it is not just rights, and it's not just law that we need to turn to, although we need to turn to those things too. But at the end of the day, we need to turn to a feeling that there are stories and there are ideas, and there are responsibilities among all of us that need to be at front and center of our capacity to live together well, to protect one another, to respect the rights and freedoms that all of us are deserving of. And in some ways, that's a story of exile that Jordan and I, we hope has some impact. Jordan, we should probably say something about some of our special guests whose families show up in the book. Do you want to say a word?

  JS-R: Sure. I think in part, Eric is referring to Lillian Mizuyabu, who's here in the room. Hi, Lillian, do you want to give a wave? Lillian and her family really generously shared the records of her father, Yukiharu Mizuyabu, who himself had written about this history. He has a wonderful essay online through “Redress: The Toronto Story”. He wrote an article or a chapter about his experience, and gave interviews along with many hundreds of Japanese Canadians who have given interviews and left a legacy of a wonderfully rich historical resource for folks like Eric and me to build upon. Yukiharu was the son of a very successful fisher in Nanaimo. He's one of three Japanese Canadians around whom we center -- one of our approaches of conveying Japanese Canadian voices in the book is to center on these three individuals, and to follow them from childhood through the experience of uprooting internment, dispossession and ultimately exile to Japan. And so Lillian's father was exiled to Japan. His father, Tsunejiro Mizuyabu was a fisher and a very successful fisher. And one of the things, Lillian, you have a family story, and so there's parts of it to which I've become attached. And we were just talking earlier about how it's an emotional and strange, in a way dynamic, but one of the things that Lillian's family did was in the first stage of the uprooting folks from places like Nanaimo outside of the Vancouver area were first sent to Hastings Park as some in the room may know, which was a detention facility, and just an awful prison.

  That, I think is one of the really grotesque aspects I would say of the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians, where they were held in animal stalls and there weren't adequate bathing facilities, not adequate bathrooms. And so Lillian's father was there as a young child with his family. And her grandfather was convinced that the policy wouldn't go forward, and that ultimately, they would be able to return to Nanaimo. And so what that meant is, as waves of Japanese Canadians passed through this facility, ultimately about 8,000 people passed through the facility, their family stayed for months. I think your dad may have had a birthday at Hastings Park. They spent months there as Tsunejiro still hoped to return to Nanaimo. And I just think of that perseverance in staying under those conditions in the hopes of returning to home. And then ultimately, Lillian's father did return, and the three people who we focused upon did return to Canada. Each of them gave interviews. Each of them helped us to understand this history. And certainly, your family has been very generous to us in helping us to write this book, as have many members of the community. And maybe I'll just also mention Ann Sunahara because she's in the front row here. Ann wrote a book that is still urgent and necessary reading almost 50 years after its original publication, first published in 1981, and The Politics of Racism, which is available online at japanesecanadianhistory.ca. So just after you purchase a copy of our book -- it's a free supplement to the purchase of our book. And I think we cite 29 times or something in the course of the book, just an amazing foundational work and that it came also in the context of redress. It came at a moment when that history was really needed for a consequential political movement. So both in the way it endured and in the moment in which it appeared -- just a remarkable and transformative work. So, thank you, Ann.

  EMA: Before we open up if there are any questions, just the last thing I'll say is just our thanks to the staff here who've made this event possible at Library and Archives Canada. And really through the last more than a decade that Jordan and I have been working in this building and online with these materials, archivists are such a key part of making sure that we don't forget histories that should not be forgotten. And so we have been grateful as scholars to be able to rely on the work of people whose names you do not know, who are behind the scenes, and making sure that these records, some of them very challenging and some of them telling stories that aren't very positive, are preserved aspects of our history. And so, in a city like Ottawa, you'll know that we need employees to do that work to make sure that that history continues into the future. And finally, it's a visual history too, so on the screens you'll see evidence of the documents we looked at and some of the amazing photos Jordan insisted right from the very beginning that this also be a visual record that we wanted our book to have amazing images to convey the humanity of the people that we were writing about. And so, again, our thanks to the families that we were working with, because they shared family photos and allowed us to put them in this book. And also amazing photos at Library and Archives Canada that also tells this history in a powerful way through visuals. And so with all of that, I think maybe we're really happy to take some questions after Audrey has a final word.

  AK: I just can't help telling you a little story because in 1981, when Ann's book was being published, I was a PhD student in Japan doing research in a village, Kayidihima in Shiga-ken, I don't know if any of you have ancestors from there, probably not. But it was a village, and there are four or five of them in Japan. They're called Immigrant Villages, and almost every household has someone who was born in Canada or people who went to Canada and came back to Japan because of work, et cetera. And the emotions of the people in that village run the full gamut from someone who graduated from high school in Kitsilano and has fond memories of playing baseball to an elderly woman who began to scream at me that she had been treated as an animal by the Canadians, and that was a big shocker. It was something to learn about doing field research and how to approach people. But I remember standing in that village and looking around at people who were still, 1981, in traditional Japanese dress in the fields sieving rice and realizing that person is a Canadian, that I'm surrounded by Canadians in a setting that would not be recognizable to most Canadians. And it was a moment when I kind of grew up as a researcher. But this is just to say that the marks of the events and the documents that are documented in this book remain very strong upon the landscape in Japan itself.

  JW: Thank you for tuning in to “Unscripted,” a podcast series presented by Discover Library and Archives Canada. I'm your host, Jennifer Woodley. With each episode, we share fascinating conversations from a variety of vibrant events happening throughout the year. In this series, you’ll hear from authors, artists and many other inspiring voices who help shape our cultural landscape.

  A special thank-you to today’s guests, Audrey Kobayashi, Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross. Voiceover for the French equivalent of this episode was done by Euphrasie Mujawamungu, Roldson Dieudonné, Gérard-Hubert Étienne and Théo Martin. To listen to the French equivalent of our episodes, visit our website or find us on your favourite podcast app. Simply search for “Découvrez Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.”

  The music you heard in this episode is courtesy of BlueDotSessions.com. To continue exploring, visit the Library and Archives Canada home page and type “podcast” in the search bar. As always, if you have questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact us at the email address listed on the podcast web page.

Facilitator: Gary Goodacre, Director, Programs, Visitor and Collection Care Branch

Moderator: Audrey Kobayashi

Guests: Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross, authors of Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution

Host: Jennifer Woodley, Multimedia Production Specialist, Visitor & Collection Care Branch

Voiceover for the French version of this podcast: Roldson Dieudonné, Coordinator, Communications and Policy Branch; Gérard-Hubert Etienne, Senior Analyst, Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP), ATIP Branch; Théo Martin, Archivist, Performing Arts Archives, Private Archives and Published Heritage Branch; and Euphrasie Mujawamungu, Librarian, Published Heritage, Private Archives and Published Heritage Branch

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